Friday, June 28, 2013

Kiyosumi Garden

Kiyosumi Garden, Tokyo (May 26, 2012)

We spent our first weekend in Japan with some friends we knew from our time in Boston. John Silverman was a Smithsonian Predoctoral Fellow at the time I was a postdoc at the Center for Astrophysics. He and Yumiko, his wife, moved to Japan when he took a position at the Kavli Institute for the Physics and Mathematics of the Universe (IPMU). They now live in the Tokyo area with their son Daise (pictured in the small photo on the left, while he is taking a photo of his dad and mom). We met at the Kiyosumi-shirakawa Metro train station in the Fukugawa area, which is one of the representative hitamachi (old city) part of Tokyo. The station is very close to the celebrated Kiyosumi Garden. The garden is very beautiful. Built at the end of the XIX century, it has a large pond with three little islands. A path meanders around the pond, sometimes crossing small inlets of the lake on stepping-stones. A famous characteristics of the park is its collection of water-worn boulders, brought from all over Japan to give characters to the landscape. The pond hosts many large koi fishes and snapping turtles, and attracts many beautiful birds, like the one in the photo above.